Starting Strategy Dilemma for Prince and Higher

[PaganPaulwhisky]

BW is probably the single most powerful early tech but it's often wrong to beeline straight for it...

I still think its best to beeline for it in most cases, especially if you have mining. Most likely bronze will complete slightly after your worker does and then you will probably be building a settler so your city will not really benefit from any food resources at this stage. The sooner you get the bronze, the sooner you will be able to chop out that first settler and get your second city going.

If you delay bronze, you might be able to improve a tile or two, but then your worker will have precious little to do. The point of getting that worker out early is to have him constantly doing stuff and with bronze hes gonna be working his a** off. If you're going for vertical growth then bronze is not needed immediately and you can focus on other stuff. Another exception is if you have cows in which case AH prob takes precedence or if you start with mysticism then you will want an early religion.

[proviisori]

worker first or maybe one warrior.
Beeline to BW is a must, because you want that second city quickly. Always chop your settlers!

[uberfish]

Well ignoring the fact that only some civs start with mining, researching agriculture and getting +3 food from say a river corn as quickly as possible gives you a large extra chunk of food over what you'd have gotten if you went straight for bronze. If that quicker growth means you can work a second improved resource early, you're that much further ahead over the bronze-first-everytime route. Also, any surplus food you have in the city counts as hammers towards settler or worker production.

[PaganPaulwhisky]

any surplus food you have in the city counts as hammers towards settler or worker production.

Good point, I totally forgot about that (shows how often I chop my settlers). However, the chops are still faster. I just prefer to sacrifice some of my initial growth to get that first settler out very fast. My early city will more than compensate for the lack of early resources.

Both approaches work well I think. Your early food surplus will also come in handy for chop rushing an early army, whereas I will probably rely more on chops at the beginning.

[proviisori]

Originally posted by uberfish
Well ignoring the fact that only some civs start with mining, researching agriculture and getting +3 food from say a river corn as quickly as possible gives you a large extra chunk of food over what you'd have gotten if you went straight for bronze. If that quicker growth means you can work a second improved resource early, you're that much further ahead over the bronze-first-everytime route. Also, any surplus food you have in the city counts as hammers towards settler or worker production.

Given the fact that you usually have some forest around, you don't need to build settler in an convetional way. It hampers the growth too much! So the best way to build settlers is by chopping.

-You can build something else while the worker is chopping and thus the city can grow.
-Then just before the worker finishes the chop, you change production to settler.
-worker begins another chop and you switch production something other than settler
-again just before chop ends, switch prod to settler and complete it

this way you halt the growth only for few turns!

edit: and you also can build something usefull at the same time like warrior or barracs

[CraigRichardson]

Originally posted by Flamer(fin)

Given the fact that you usually have some forest around, you don't need to build settler in an convetional way. It hampers the growth too much! So the best way to build settlers is by chopping.

Depends on what you're doing. The 2-city CS slingshot IME requires 9 chops (at Monarch) if you want GL as well. 11 would be better. And that's without chopping units.

Even if I have 11 forest around (a friend, on an Island start, had a total of 2 !), which is not common, I like to have 2 per city for mid-game lumbermills + health boost.

I much prefer to use the food surplus on my first two improved tiles to make workers & settlers faster (maybe with one judicious chop, but not more). If I had a primeval forest around my capital, I might choose differently, but sparse forest is much more common in the starts I've gotten.